80

Please clarify what is the difference between <meta name="title"> tag and <title></title> tag.

<title>Page title</title>
<meta name="title" content="Page title">

If both are used, which is most prioritised?

I observed some sites that have both <meta name="title"> and <title></title> tags and both are the same, which is expected, please confirm?

If we didn't use <meta name="title"> tag title, would I have any problem regarding SEO?

<head>
<title>Stackoverflow</title>
<meta name="description" content="free source">
<meta name="keywords" content="HTML,CSS,XML,JavaScript">    
</head>
RyanS
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Rajasekhar
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4 Answers4

68

<title> is a required element on any HTML page to be valid markup, and will be what is displayed as the page title in your browser's tab/window title. For instance, try inputting the following markup into the W3C Markup Validator (via "Direct Input"):

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
    <head></head>
    <body></body>
</html>

This will produce an error that there is no instance of <title> in <head>.

The <meta name="title" content="page-title"> element is just that -- metadata about your page, that any client browser or web crawler can use or not use as it wants. Whether it is used or not will depend on the crawler/client in question, as none of them are required to look for or not look for it.

So in short, you should have a <title> element if you want valid markup. The <meta> tag is going to depend on whether you want to provide for crawlers/clients, and you'd probably have to check documentation for if a particular crawler uses it.

ajp15243
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    The `` element will most probably be ignored, as it is not mentioned in any specification or public draft or even at http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/MetaExtensions. It is, like so many `meta` tags, a write-only tag, with illusionary effects only. – Jukka K. Korpela Jan 12 '14 at 18:21
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    @JukkaK.Korpela In practice, I am sure you're correct. I was trying to explain more of the theory side of it, but I'd be surprised if any crawlers care about it. – ajp15243 Jan 12 '14 at 19:48
  • Apparently i recognize the words stated here. Its like copy paste from other source hhe – Faris Rayhan Jul 13 '18 at 09:37
  • Google does not recognize `` : https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/crawling/special-tags – Michael Liquori Jul 06 '21 at 15:58
  • `` is actually the **ONLY** [required tag](https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/syntax.html#optional-tags). The minimum structure of a valid html document is `<!DOCTYPE html> <title>Your Title`. – Besworks Jun 07 '22 at 17:26
16

The first is to display page name.

<title> This will be displayed in the title bar of your Browser. </title>

Second is for crawling.

<meta name="title" content="Whatever you type in here will be displayed on search engines.">
Ranveer
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    do current search engines even use that for crawling? or even the meta keywords? – Gasim Jan 12 '14 at 15:09
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    I guess they do. The meta tags are used in case you want the name of your site to be displayed differently in search engines. Why would they not use such a useful thing? – Ranveer Jan 12 '14 at 15:10
  • Some meta tags are used to have the page redirect or to set other variables? – Doug Hauf Jul 08 '14 at 18:29
  • Right! I didn't know that. Just read it up [here](http://webmaster.iu.edu/tools-and-guides/maintenance/redirect-meta-refresh.phtml). Are they very commonly used that way though? – Ranveer Jul 09 '14 at 03:19
  • Why should any search engine consider the content of the meta title element? It isn't displayed to the end user, so this would lead to a lot of search engine spam. For the very same reason the meta keywords tag isn't used by search engines any more. – z80crew Sep 08 '14 at 14:42
  • @z80crew Oh! Is it so? Then what do Search Engines use these days? – Ranveer Sep 08 '14 at 15:01
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    @Ranveer They use a plethora of ranking factors. The most important onpage factors being the `` tag and the visible content on the page. This is combined with backlink factors and a lot of usage patterns as time spent on the site or bounce rate, especially bounces back to the search engine result page. – z80crew Sep 09 '14 at 12:49
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    Late; but related: "Our web search (the well-known search at Google.com that hundreds of millions of people use each day) disregards keyword metatags completely." – Matt Cutts, Search Quality Team https://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2009/09/google-does-not-use-keywords-meta-tag.html – William Isted Jan 07 '16 at 14:33
5

The <title> tag will actually display the page name at the top of the page. The <meta> tag, while used for crawling, could be omitted and the page still should crawl over the <title> tag. I think you could just stick with the <title> tag if you wanted.

mjkaufer
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  • I observed some sites both meta tag title and tags both are same,which is expected,plase confirm? – Rajasekhar Jan 12 '14 at 15:15
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    Yea, that's what I've been saying. You can go either way. If you're worried about optimization for web crawling, you don't need a `meta` tag. Most web crawlers are smart enough to check the `title` tag if there isn't a `meta` tag. `meta` can be used for more, like content, etc. but `` is almost completely synonymous with `page-title` – mjkaufer Jan 12 '14 at 15:39
-4

I have noticed that for some blog sites google will use 

<meta name="description"

for a general description of the site.

So, if you have a blog site where the home page also shows the latest blog post you don't want the site description to be the same as the blog post name defined in

So I'd try meta description for an overview and 

<title>

for specific content.

Norbert Norbertson
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